The end of the venerable skid row strip came when its last two surviving flophouses came tumbling down in the 600 block of West Madsison Street in 1982. They were razed to make way for Presidential Towers. The apartment complex was the brainchild of John Cordwell, a transplanted British architect and partner of Solomon, Cordwell, Buenz & Assoc., Inc.
Cordwell says he had been thinking about putting a large apartment development in the Near West Side for nearly 30 years. He says he always thought such a complex there would have the same effect as the one he designed in the 1950s for the Near North Side–Sandburg Village.
”When we designed Sandburg Village,” Cordwell says, ”it was for an area that had a horrible reputation as being run-down and dangerous. It was a neighborhood full of the worst kinds of honky tonks, B-girl hustling joints and cheap rooming houses. Nobody respectable felt very comfortable walking around there in those days, and I`m not just talking about Clark and Division. That included Astor, Dearborn and North State Parkway.
”We thought if we put in a lot of attractive, reasonably priced, middle class housing all at once, it would have an effect. Everybody told us we were crazy to think that decent, middle class people would be attracted to the area, but we thought differently. It would flood the streets day and night with people who had a stake in the neighborhood, who would see to it that it was a safe and respectable place to live.
”What we did, in effect, by putting Sandburg where we did was to drop a pebble in the pond and watch the ripples go out. And, sure enough, confidence in the area soared. From Sandburg east to Lake Shore Drive, it suddenly became a very respectable, very sought-after place to live.”
If anything, the Near West Side was an even drearier spot for a giant apartment complex than North Clark Street had been in the 1950s. Presidential Towers is being built on a portion of a 6 1/2-square-block parcel of land put together by the city along Madison Street from Canal Street to the Kennedy Expressway. Starting in the 1960s the city acquired the land parcel in bits and pieces in hopes of encouraging office development.
Called the Madison/Canal District, several vast development plans were announced for the area over the years, but none of them took root. As interest in downtown apartment living began to grow in the late 1970s, Cordwell thought the time might be right to revive his idea for a Near West Side apartment complex.
Cordwell says he eventually sold the idea of Presidential Towers to the consortium of developers who have since built the complex. They include James McHugh and Daniel Levin of McHugh-Levin Associates and Dan Shannon of the Madison-Canal Co.
The developers bought the land needed for the apartment buildings from the city, paying $7.6 million, the same price the city had been asking for the parcel 15 years earlier. They were also able to obtain the major financing for the construction through two major government subsidies.
One was a $158-million insured, low-interest federal mortgage, the other a $180 million, low-interest construction loan raised by the city through the sale of tax-exempt bonds.
The deal put together by the developers fueled controversies both in Chicago and in Washington, D.C. Critics openly questioned the propriety of using taxpayers` money to subsidize construction of housing for affluent renters.
Early in 1982 newly elected mayor Harold Washington wavered briefly over whether to allow the sale of the city bonds to finance the project. In the end, he allowed the sale to go through.
Though Presidential Towers was Cordwell`s brainchild, he assigned the actual design work to his partner, John Buenz.
”When we first started kicking around the idea of putting up middle class housing down along skid row,” Buenz says, ”we heard the same thing we heard when we started Sandburg Village. We were crazy. We were nuts. I suppose it did sound a little nutty, but the attraction of the area`s access to the Loop–a 5- or 10-minute walk to nearly any office down there–was the selling point.”
One of the big problems with the West Madison Street location, Buenz says, was that the neighborhood, at least at the time, had virtually no amenities except for its proximity to the Loop.
To counter that he designed the amenities right into the complex. A gourmet, full-service supermarket has already opened in a three-story shopping annex at the base of the complex. The annex also will offer three restaurants by the end of the year, including a fast-food emporium, a fern bar and brass rail eatery and a higher priced fine-dining establishment. Before the end of the year the annex will house an athletic club with indoor swimming pool, exercise rooms and outdoor running track, along with an indoor shopping mall containing convenience stores and specialty shops.
Though a whole new neighborhood had to be designed right into the complex, Cordwell says he is convinced the neighborhood surrounding Presidential Towers soon will offer its own amenities.
”Sandburg was the right statement at the right time to give people confidence in a neighborhood that had gone drastically downhill,” Cordwell says.
”With Presidential Towers, we are making a very bold statement. It`s a big S.O.B., as big as Sandburg Village, only this time we`ve built it all at once. Very soon now, you are going to see an awful lot of new people in the Loop and in the streets around Presidential Towers, both night and day. They are going to have a positive effect on the entire downtown area.
”There`s another pebble in the pool with Presidential Towers, and the ripples are going out. You can go west of the Kennedy, out towards Ashland Avenue, and you`ll see some very interesting beads waiting to be strung together. There`s the police academy, the Whitney Young Magnet School, the Jackson Boulevard district and some beautiful buildings. And a lot of vacant lots.
”When one thing goes, then all the other things can get started. That`s what happened around Sandburg, and that`s what is going to happen around here.”
Some of the beads Cordwell refers to already are being strung together by smaller developers taking advantage of a tax incentive program devised by the Reagan administration. The Economic Recovery Act of 1981 offers a 25 percent tax credit for the total cost of rehabilitating buildings more than 40 years old.
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Passage of the act set off a boom of rehab work across the country, around the city and on the Near West Side in particular. A number of smaller entrepreneurs began grabbing up old factory buildings from Clinton Street clear out to Ashland and converting them into loft office buildings.
Krantzen Studios is a 35-year-old family-owned design, photography and graphics company that does more photography for mail order catalogues than any other firm in the world. In 1982 Thomas Guttoch, president of the company, wanted to consolidate his operations into one large building. At the time, he had 250 employes working in two separate studios, one in Bellwood and one at 612 S. Clinton St. Because most of his major clients were in downtown Chicago, he wanted to remain as close to the Loop as possible.
At the same time, Goodwill Industries was trying to sell its job-training center at 120 S. Ashland Ave. A huge building with 350,000 square feet that was built in 1924 as a Wieboldt`s department store, it seemed like a white elephant on the market. Guttoch, however, was looking for a big building with a lot of open floor space to accommodate studios for his 35 photographers, and the Goodwill building was perfect for his needs.
”Without the tax break our move wouldn`t have been feasible,” Guttoch says. ”Without the tax break most of the activity that`s going on out here wouldn`t have gotten started.
”Businesses like photographic studios can`t afford to operate downtown, but they have to be close enough to downtown to have rapid access to their customers. That`s why this location is so perfect for us. You can get into a car out in front and be over at the front door of Sears Tower in five minutes. ”But we were able to purchase and rehabilitate this building at $15 a square foot, while new construction would have cost somewhere between $50 and $100 a square foot.”
The same year Guttoch was looking for a place to expand his business, A. Epstein & Sons was hired to do the architectural work on an old factory being converted to office lofts near Van Buren and Halsted Streets. The firm was thinking about moving its own headquarters from the Southwest Side nearer to the Loop, and the more its officers saw of the Near West Side, the more they liked it.
”There was new construction and rehabilitation going on everywhere,”
says Sheldon Schlegman, vice president and principal designer at Epstein`s.
”You could just feel a tremendous commitment to the community.”
Looking around, Epstein found an eight-story warehouse, built by Sears in 1902 as one of its original mail order distribution centers, at 600 W. Fulton St. It looked like an old warehouse surrounded by a lot of other old warehouses, but it fit the firm`s needs. It had huge, open floor spaces, it was cheap and it was close to the Loop. After Epstein purchased the warehouse, Schlegman set about designing its conversion into a stunning loft building with an atrium entrance and preserving its original skylight roof. Epstein took over the top three floors for its own offices and rents out the remaining five.
The corner of Fulton and Jefferson Streets, on which the Epstein building stands, still has the utilitarian look of an old warehouse district, with high curbs and ancient loading docks, but it won`t for long. Kitty-corner from the Epstein building, the Schwinn Bicycle Co., which was considering moving its headquarters, at 1856 N. Kostner Ave., out of Chicago, instead is converting an old warehouse into its international headquarters. Directly across the street another developer is rehabbing yet another warehouse into office lofts designed to lure lawyers and other LaSalle Street-type firms away from the Loop. While Fulton Street isn`t about to replace LaSalle Street as a prestige corporate address, it has its own brand of charm and panache.
”I can sit at my desk and look East out the window straight down the river to the Michigan Avenue skyline,” Schlegman says. ”It`s one of the most beautiful cityscapes in the world. I keep thinking there are people on the other side of the river looking back at me, but I`ve got a better view than they do. And on this side of the river, office space rents for about one third what it costs on their side.”
The cheap rent and the cachet of working in a modernized historic building aren`t the only things that have attracted pinstriped white-collar workers across the river to the Near West Side. They also find themselves closer to the major commuter railroad stations and the city`s expressway system than any downtown address.
”I can walk half a block from my office to the Congress subway line and be in the Loop in 4 minutes,” says Barry Kreisler, president of Matanky Realty. His firm is one of the major entrepreneurial rehab firms taking advantage of the tax bargains offered by the Economic Recovery Act now transforming the neighborhood. His office is in a former lingerie factory at 910 W. Van Buren St., which soon will be filled with tenants employing nearly 300 office workers.
Across the street the University of Illinois has converted an old factory into its faculty club and into classrooms. A block east, another former factory, the Rice Building, is leasing 100,000 square feet of office space. A block north, a former wedding ring factory has been leased out as office space at 900 W. Jackson Blvd., while across the street an old garment factory is being converted into offices. A block west of Kreisler`s building, Reliable Corp., an office supply company, has totally rehabilitated its three-building complex into a warehouse, sales and office complex. So much rehab work has taken place in the vicinity in the last five years that the various developers working in the area have given the neighborhood its own name–Westgate Mill District.
The phenomenon of Westgate Mill has been repeated to varying degrees up and down the streets of the Near West Side. Developers and private businesses are rushing to take advantage of the rehab tax breaks before they expire later this year. More building permits have been issued for the Near West Side in the last four years than for any other area of the city.
Cheap office rents and the area`s proximity to the Loop have made it an obvious bargain for businesses. But the appearance of Presidential Towers`
2,346 apartments brought a whole new dimension to the area. Developers realized that what could be converted into an office loft could just as easily be converted into a residential loft.
Allen Marrinson is a developer who put up townhouses in the university area south of the Eisenhower Expressway in the 1970s. He says that as property around the campus became harder and harder to acquire, he often found himself staring longingly at the bounty of empty buildings north of the expressway. Three years ago he acquired adjoining buildings at Sangamon and Van Buren Streets, across the street from Matanky Realty, and began refurbishing them as an 80-unit loft condominium.
”That first winter I was sitting by myself in a makeshift office in the building looking down at the expressway,” Marrinson says, ”wondering if I had made the mistake of my life.”
The two buildings quickly sold out all units, and Marrinson is rehabbing four other buildings in the area, three into office buildings, the fourth into loft residences.
”As it turned out,” Marrinson says, ”the university community being across the expressway was a big draw for people moving in here. Besides the obvious opportunity to attend classes there, there`s something going on at the school almost every night of the week. Neighborhood residents can use any of its sports facilities for $125 a year. There are foreign films being shown nearly every night at the student union. The university Pavilion has major attractions and sporting events all year round, and a really fine shopping center is growing up over there.”
Robert Wiggs, executive director of the West Central Association, says he thinks that the Near West Side soon will be as much a residential neighborhood as it is commercial and industrial. Besides Presidential Towers, he says, the impact of 1,000 dormitory residents coming to the university will tip the balance and make the area more attractive for future apartment and home development.